A middle school's must-have app: Apple's AirDrop

“They laughed in my face when I asked what they thought about Facebook,” writes Business Insider’s Maya Kosoff in her report Friday on what she learned during the holidays from her younger cousins. “It’s for moms,” they explained.

Then a 13-year-old cousin asked Kosoff if she knew about AirDrop.

There followed an unsolicited endorsement for a little-known iPhone feature from a key Apple cohort: Schoolchildren with smartphones.

Among the kids in her cousins’ New Jersey middle school, Kosoff reports, the most-used app for exchanging images during school hours isn’t Snapchat or Instagram, but AirDrop.

AirDrop is superior, my cousin declared, because unlike with Snapchat, you don’t need anyone’s username to send something to them. She also said that this is what makes AirDrop better than texting: you don’t need anybody’s phone number. As long as you have AirDrop enabled on your phone, anyone nearby can send you a file. Plus, she told me some schools have blocked Snapchat, so AirDrop is essentially a workaround.”

Kosoff pointed out to her cousins that not everyone uses an iPhone. They countered that in their school nearly everyone does.